"Innocent Bystanders" director Peter Collinson emphasizes action shrouded in mystery in scenarist Scot Finch's cinematic adaptation of Louis L'Amour's novel "The Man Called Noon," with Richard Crenna plagued by amnesia while a passel of trigger-happy pistoleros do their best to pack him full of lead. "Conan the Barbarian" lenser John Cabrera photographed this invigorating oater on various scenic Spanish locations where earlier westerns, such as Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West" and John Guillermin's "El Condor," had been shot, and Collinson and he frame each shot so that this dusty, windswept horse opera is easy on the eyes. James Bond movie aficionados should savor the fact that stunt man Bob Simmons (the guy in the gun barrel sequences of "Dr. No" and "From Russia, With Love" arranged the stunts. The scenes of horsemen toppling from their saddles and horses plunging into the camera are genuinely exciting. Crenna faces the same trouble that Matt Damon would confront forty or so year later with his loss of memory. Mind you, it takes one spectacular fall from a hotel balcony and later another down the side of a mountain for our stalwart hero to recover his wits while his adversaries blast away at him. Oscar winning actor Stephen Boyd and former MGM contract player Farley Granger cannot seem to figure out what side they are on and whether they are going to riddle our hero. Similarly, two women—Italian beauty Rosanna Schiaffino of "The Long Ships" and Patty Shepard of "The Stranger and the Gunfighter"—stand on either side of our protagonist, but they have already decided what they are going to do about him. The last-minute showdown between these two dames is something to see, especially with Shepard decked out in black with a flat-crowned hat. Collinson and Finch don't lollygag around in this sagebrusher. Just as Jonas Mandarin (Richard Crenna of "Catlow") has finished dressing in his hotel room in Kiowa Flats, villainous sharpshooter Ben Janish (Ángel del Pozo of "Hell in the Aegean") creases Jonas' scalp with a bullet, and Jonas crashes through his window and falls into the street. Scrambling to escape from a search party of armed desperadoes, our resilient hero climbs aboard a train pulling out of town. Janish's henchmen assemble to find, but they lose him. Meantime, Jonas dashes across the rooftops of box cars (this is splendidly staged by Collinson) as the train chugs away into the distance. He winds up in a box car with a scruffy, six-gun toting owlhoot, Rimes (Stephen Boyd of "Ben-Hur"), and they behave like partners for a while. Eventually, they end up at a ranch presided over by the lovely Fan Davidge (Rosanna Schiaffino) who suffers under the tyranny of Janish. After Fan cleans up Jonas' scalp wound, our hero joins a group of ruffians in a nearby bunkhouse and proves his wits with his fists. He slugs it out with a couple and then settles down for a long overdue nap. The following day, Jonas saddles himself a horse with Fan's permission. Rimes and he gallop off into the wilderness. Rimes warns Jonas that the area is rift with 50 box canyons with no way out of them. Nevertheless, our wily protagonist finds a fortress of a stone house off in the mountain. This innocuous looking place looks comfortable within and Jonas leads Rimes to an elevator to a cave and an outlet where they catch a ride aboard another train. Collinson and Finch release information in piecemeal fashion to keep us in the dark as long as possible, and things slowly come together when Jonas learns about a lawyer named Cullane who has been recently killed. Stealthily, Jonas inventories Cullane's office, and he runs into Cullane's homicidal sister and later a character named Judge Niland (Farley Granger of "Strangers on a Train") who initially appears to be a good guy. Later, we learn that the noble judge isn't so noble, and he wants to kill Jonas. Our hero, Rimes, and Fan are trapped in the stone-house during the last quarter hour and have to shoot it out with hordes of henchmen while they contend with dynamite being hurled at them and smoke from burning sagebrush. As you can see, Collinson refuses to let the action loiter, and "The Man Called Noon" doesn't let up throughout its 98-bullet-blasting minutes. Richard Crenna is appropriately tight-lipped and he displays his prowess with a pistol as he keeps knocking down targets on rooftops and behind doors in the fortress sequence. "The Man Called Noon" qualifies a hard-riding western that doesn't wear out its welcome.
Review of The Man Called Noon
